Doug Fairbanks

Superstar of the Silents

Nor are there any for that majority of people who continue to imagine, as he and his generation of stars first taught us, that youth is eternal, that final curtains are somehow un-American. If F. Scott Fitzgerald, the other American whose story Fairbanks’ reminds us of and who was himself fascinated by the unfinished quality of our lives, had lived long enough, perhaps he might have worked something about Fairbanks into The Last Tycoon . Fairbanks belonged, certainly, in someone’s Hollywood novel, though of course there is a little bit of him in all of them—and in the collective unconscious of all of us.